Get organized by Tyler

Get organized by Tyler - April 2016 Scholarship Essay

During my freshman and sophomore years of high school, school was fairly straightforward. I went to school from 8:30 a.m.to 3:05 p.m., spent an hour after school at a club meeting or tennis practice, then had the rest of the day to finish the homework that took about ten minutes didn’t take long to complete. Not only was the schedule easy to follow, but it was laid out for me and did not have much room for deviation. It was not until I reached junior year where I realized the importance of time-management. While the classes weren’t unreasonably more difficult than previous years, the volume of homework increased and became more thought-provoking. I become more active in after-school activities, which chipped away at my time to study and do homework. When I give advice to younger students, I always tell them to work on their time-management and organization skills. I wish I had.

My junior year was my first real experience with not having the abundance of time that I was accustomed to. One reason for my increased workload was the opportunity to take Advanced Placement (AP) classes. These classes were much more rigorous than the Honors classes I had taken. Due to my seniority and knowledge, I took on leadership positions with many of my extra-curricular activities. With what seemed like shorter days, I made weekly schedules and daily to-do lists to ensure I made every minute of the day count. It took some time and many nights of limited sleep before I came up with an organization strategy that worked for me. Because I didn’t already have these skills in place, I learned them through trial and error. It was not a smooth transition.

Eventually, I believed I had my time-management skills figured out. I was more comfortable as a leader for the many organizations and teams I was involved with. My AP and dual-credit classes were better managed as I was efficiently completing the work. Everything was going well until I started to get news from colleges. E-mails, letters, information given out in school- there was no getting away from the loads of papers and notifications that barraged me on a daily basis. While time management was no longer an issue with my high school obligations, I easily had hundreds, if not thousands of letters and emails asking me to apply to their college. I was not prepared for this incursion from colleges begging me to take time out of my schedule to notice them. I made the decision that it would be unreasonable to look through all of the requests that had been sent to me since I would never make it through in a reasonable time while also keeping up with my other tasks. I moved all of the notifications to the side and began looking up colleges independently, searching for qualities that interested me. Once I had narrowed down the colleges I was interested in, I looked through the letters and e-mails for those colleges and researched what each had to offer. I threw out and deleted correspondence from every other college. This strategy helped me maintain focus on my grades and after-school activities while streamlining my college search.

Before my junior year, I was warned that school would get harder. Unfortunately, no one explained what was going to make it harder. I want to I tell younger students, it’s the increased academic challenges, the desire to continue to enjoy time with your friends and the activities you’ve always been involved with, and the abundance of responsibilities that come with planning for college. It’s the ability to balance your present with what you want your future to be. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of time-management and organization skills. Had I had these earlier in life, I would have had much less stress in my junior and senior year. I may have been able to enjoy the college search experience. While I can’t say I’ve mastered these skills, I can say that I will graduate in the top 5% of my class, have been accepted to all the colleges I applied to, and can’t remember the last time I had to stay up late doing homework.